Emergence of Altruism Behavior for Multi Feeding Areas in Army Ant Social Evolutionary System
This work addresses a domain-specific problem in bio-inspired computing and swarm intelligence, with incremental contributions to understanding multi-feeding area scenarios.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling altruistic behavior in army ants for constructing optimal bridges between multiple feeding areas and a nest, using a social evolutionary system with two types of ant agents and pheromone communication, and reports simulation results showing interesting altruistic behaviors.
Army ants perform the altruism that an ant sacrifices its own well-being for the benefit of another ants. Army ants build bridges using their own bodies along the path from a food to the nest. We developed the army ant inspired social evolutionary system which can perform the altruism. The system has 2 kinds of ant agents, `Major ant' and `Minor ant' and the ants communicate with each other via pheromones. One ants can recognize them as the signals from the other ants. The pheromones evaporate with the certain ratio and diffused into the space of neighbors stochastically. If the optimal bridge is found, the path through the bridge is the shortest route from foods to the nest. We define the probability for an ant to leave a bridge at a low occupancy condition of ants and propose the constructing method of the optimal route. In this paper, the behaviors of ant under the environment with two or more feeding spots are observed. Some experimental results show the behaviors of great interest with respect to altruism of ants. The description in some computer simulation is reported in this paper.